An increasingly litigious environment and the presence of new rules and regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 present serious problems for the modern computer centered and information driven business enterprise. In particular, preservation of data stored on their computers to protect it from spoliation, deletion or corruption may be required in order for a business enterprise to satisfy legal requirements for electronic discovery (E-Discovery) as well as compliance requirements related to government prescribed regulations. Even in the absence of such requirements or regulations a robust data preservation policy may also act as a proactive measure toward ensuring that the data driving business decisions is always available on demand.
A number of solutions are available to find and preserve documents carrying the business-critical information by making copies of these documents and storing them in a reliable or secure location. Depending on the end-goal, such solutions may be labeled as back-up solutions (copying to ensure recoverability on loss of data), archive solutions (moving data from an active and heavily used server to ensure servers can perform optimally) or preservation solutions (copying to ensure availability of authentic data in case of spoliation or corruption during an on-going lawsuit). Solutions to find and preserve documents will be referred to collectively herein as preservation solutions.
The traditional preservation solutions described above have evolved over time to develop the ability to preserve more modern forms of data. However, as the world continues to move towards ever more complex forms of data such as data for collaborative platforms, these preservation solutions are having to keep up with the increasingly complex structures used to store and associate this type of data.
To compound the problem further, by their intended design many of these collaborative platforms actively encourage multiple users to edit or add to a particular object, increasing the complexity of the structures used to store this data and creating revisions of these objects that may be desirable to preserve to ensure that the history and lifecycle of such objects is also tracked.
What is desired then, are preservation solutions which efficiently and effectively identify and preserve such objects.